


Know how to stop

by cupiscent



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-03
Updated: 2007-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:37:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupiscent/pseuds/cupiscent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're working together under protest. Voluble protest. Shakespeare knew what that meant. (Post "My Mother the Fiend".)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know how to stop

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://adellyna.livejournal.com/profile)[**adellyna**](http://adellyna.livejournal.com/) for getting me into this in the first place, and giving great beta. Also to [](http://saintsomeone.livejournal.com/profile)[**saintsomeone**](http://saintsomeone.livejournal.com/) for stroking my ego.

Weevil had said, "We have something in common."

Logan hadn't said, "We had something in common before." Because they don't say it. Don't say, "You fucked the girl I loved."

Maybe because neither of them can figure out who should be saying it.

It's far too easy to see what Lilly saw in Weevil. And not just as a casual pissing-off-Celeste fuck, because obviously he was perfect for that, textbook definition. But he wasn't actually stupid (though there were moments - _moments_) and he had, y'know, all that stuff. Presence, a mouth, that fucking smirk. He was a doer. Wildness and control. A vicious sense of humour. He reminded Logan a little too strongly of himself, but different. He reminded Logan of Lilly.

Sometimes it's too fucking obvious that he's underlining everything he says to Weevil with _I'm not like you_. Sometimes he thinks even Weevil will hear it. Sometimes he's just waiting for the "the lady doth protest too much", or however the hell that translates into Weevil's badass barrio cant.

Then again, Weevil probably doesn't want to admit it either. Who'd want to be like Logan? Some days even he doesn't want to be.

Doesn't know how to stop, though.

*

"Well, that has come up _beautifully_." Hand on his chin, turning his head towards the light.

Logan smacks it away, glaring at Weevil. "The fuck you doing, man?"

"Admiring my handiwork." He's smirking as he takes his sprawling ease on the suite's lounge. "It's like art, really."

Logan jerks his chin. "Looking a bit decorated there yourself, Picasso." All the marks on Weevil's extended face are due to Logan, one way or another. The lingering bruise over his temple, the cut in his lip. A patchwork of pain, designed by him.

Weevil's smirk widens. "Yeah, you get it."

Logan will deny it to the grave. "Don't know what the fuck you're talking about." He kicks Weevil's feet in their stupid boots off the couch as he passes. "You're here to scheme, Captain Midnight, not chill."

*

"We gotta stop meeting like this," he tells the bathroom mirror.

"Ha ha fucking ha," Weevil trots out, like he knows it's his line.

Actually, Logan's a little serious. He spent too much time making out with Veronica in bathrooms. The connotations are starting to bug him.

Sex, drugs and violence. Well hell, his parents _were_ movie stars, after all.

*

One night Duncan comes home early when Weevil's on his feet making a point and Logan's just pinged popcorn off his stubbled scalp. Duncan doesn't say anything, but every line of the face Logan's known forever is etched into what-the-fuck. Logan's hand hesitates on its way back to the popcorn packet, then time resumes, and he wonders about what his life has become, that he can take anything on board and keep cruising, that he's sitting here eating popcorn in a hotel suite that he's just thought of as 'home'.

"Yo," he says.

Weevil just twitches his eyebrows up, leaning on the back of the couch like he wasn't just shouting about the ancient history of gangland grudges or whatever the fuck it had been.

Duncan shakes his head, and heads for his room. As he passes, Logan thinks he hears him say, "And I thought Kendall was weird."

Logan takes a moment to thank God that Veronica wasn't with him.

*

There's this thing Weevil does where he rubs his hand over the back of his neck. Logan notices it when he's talking to Veronica and it's smooth, _damn_ smooth, because it bunches up all those overworked muscles in his arm and makes the ink show in the pool of his throat but he couples it with this little downward look and Logan knows, right there, that's what did it for Lilly. The little boy meets the bad-ass, and she wouldn't've been able to get at it fast enough.

Makes him wonder if it's as easy for Weevil to pick those things about him.

Makes him wonder if he'd tell Logan what they were.

Veronica falls for it as well, just not as hard. Then again, Veronica has trust issues (takes one to know one) and Lilly didn't believe in trust to start with.

*

They pass in the hall and it's kind of like ballet now, choreographed to within an inch of its life. Like if he tries, Logan could hear the music that dictates the rhythm of his sneer, the sideways cut of Weevil's glare. There are bitpart players, too - like the dismissive threatening gestures of one of Weevil's coterie of hangers-on, or the chortle of Dick by Logan's side - but it doesn't matter what they do, just what they see. What they believe.

No one suspects a thing, and Logan has always understood half the thrill of adultery. Getting away with it under everyone's noses. Makes the payoff more piquant.

"You are going to get your ass kicked one day," Dick philosophises, leaning against the locker next to Logan's. Reconsiders. "Get your ass kicked _again_."

"Promises, promises," Logan demurs, looking back over his shoulder, but Weevil and associates have turned the corner. "And what will you do that day?"

"Laugh," Dick says, nodding thoughtfully. "And take pictures."

In his own way, Dick's got Logan's back. Weevil doesn't have it at all. He'd be stupid to think so. That's not even slightly what this is about. It makes more sense than that.

*

Logan only realises Weevil's fallen silent when he talks again. "This is _not_ basketball."

A blur of thumbs, and Logan's power forward slamdunks, hanging off the ring for a moment before dropping down again. He glances over. If Weevil slumps any lower on the couch he'll slide right off onto the floor. "What?" Logan asks.

"This." Weevil flicks a lazy finger towards the television, and Logan feels a frown twitch on his face because that feels like one of his gestures. Maybe this is what Trina feels like when she sees someone wearing a dress she owns. "Nothing like it."

"Right." Logan lets the controller dangle from one hand as he reaches for his soda. "Is this the part where you say you'll show me how it's really done, and we go out to some back alley court where you played as a kid and _bond_?"

That draws a smirk out of Weevil, not that Logan's looking for it in the flickering light from the TV. "No," he says.

Logan smirks himself, but hides it in taking a long swig from his soda. When he puts the bottle down he says, "Why you even still here? Didn't we decide already?"

"Yeah," Weevil says, sliding up a little straighter on the couch, "guess we did."

And then he does it, the neck thing, drags his palm across the back of his neck until his fingers grip over that new tattoo he's got on the side, a crown or something, and he sort of tilts his head into his hand as he looks down with the edges of that smirk still around his mouth.

Logan looks back to the TV as Weevil unfolds from the couch, just a looming shadow in his peripheral vision. Cracks his back, grabs his jacket from the table in front of Logan, leaves.

It gets incredibly quiet in the suite these days, with Duncan gone. Logan kinda fucking hates it.

*

Weevil comes to school on the bus with his face smashed up. Logan hears it from Dick, who's beside himself with glee.

"He what?" Logan says, slamming his locker shut.

Dick's chortling, doing a Weevil impression with a sulky pout and a waggling finger. Logan manages a smirk and smacks Dick's shoulder. Looks around the corridor and sees leather, but no Weevil.

He can't corner him all day. Sees him in class once with his face painted all the colours of pain, but it's not Logan's artistry this time and there's no beauty to it. Can't pin him down without everyone noticing and he wonders if it even matters at this point, but the habit's hard to break. When they finally run into each other in the corridor, Logan says the only thing he can in the presence of his peers, which is, "I have an alibi."

"Your hand is not an alibi," Weevil spits back, and shoves past, his shoulder slamming against Logan's.

*

He sends a text message - THE FUCK HAPPENED? - but it's two nights later that Weevil shows up at his door. Logan knows its him before he opens; it's not like he's flooded with visitors these days, and room service doesn't knock with that sort of belligerence. He lets him in, but Weevil doesn't stalk straight past him and sling his jacket on the table and throw himself on the couch and commandeer the remote. Just stands inside the door with his hands in his pockets and shrugs. The swelling's gone down a little.

"This ain't your issue anymore," he says. "Me and mine, I'll deal with it."

Logan blinks and can't believe what he's hearing. "What, that's it? Thanks for the help, kemosabe, now piss off?"

"Something like that," Weevil shoots back, and if there's one thing Logan can count on, it's Weevil never backing down from a fight.

He's angry - so fucking angry; he was _worried_ about him, for fuck's sake - and he steps up to Weevil (loves that he's taller than him; _loves it_) half-on, not quite face to face, more a cross of collarbones. Well, they are pirates.

He doesn't know when it changes. Picks it when Weevil's eyelashes hit his cheek (looking down, smirking, not taking Logan seriously). He can hear Lilly in his head, clear as a bell, clear as though she was resting her chin, lazy and wicked, on his shoulder and singing it in his ear. _Maybe he's born with it._

So when he leans down, leading with his hand - _grabbing_, because he doesn't give a damn about startling Weevil like he would a girl - there's a touch of a giggle in the back of his throat when the kiss starts, and that's Lilly too. Giggling and kissing, and _kissing_. She'd been the self-proclaimed world's best kisser, and even those weeks she was working through the kama sutra he occasionally liked best the whole afternoons they spent making out until his lips were worn smooth. Sometimes he thought he missed kissing every moment he wasn't doing it, and sometimes he thought that was phenomenal nonsense.

Weevil doesn't kiss a bit like Lilly. He kisses like the aggravated ex-leader of a biker gang, fists in the front of Logan's shirt, slamming him up against the wall. He kisses like a guy who's spent a lot of quality time with highly experienced girls like Lilly, learning precisely what they like and teaching them something new. He kisses hard and fast and long and deep enough that Logan needs to brace his legs against the floor, and Weevil's got a leg in between and Logan's pressing hard in the small of his back and he thinks Lilly really would've got off on this.

They both are. She definitely would've.

"You ever think about her?" he asks, not really that much later.

Weevil's dressing at the window, and Logan practically can't see him because the only light on is out in the main room of the suite. He taps against the glass, random percussion that Logan can feel himself trying to be annoyed by. He thinks he shouldn't have asked that question. Should never have - _never_ \- but especially not in this room, the sheets clammy against his leg and come still on his hands.

Weevil pulls his shirt over his head. Grabs his shoes. Says, "All the goddamn time." And leaves.

*

And Logan thinks maybe now - maybe now he knows the taste of Weevil's skin, sweat over it, ink beneath; maybe now he has the shape of Weevil's teeth bruised into the meat just above his hip; maybe now when they've more in common than ever before - maybe _now_, when he knocks shoulders with Weevil in the corridors it shouldn't be so hard, shouldn't be with such a sneer, shouldn't be so belligerent.

Doesn't know how to stop, though.

Doesn't think Weevil wants him to, anyway.


End file.
